Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Terraria (PC)

Rating: 4 out of 5

Pros: Lots of enemies, multiple bosses, good itemization

Cons: No more updates; end-game could use some fleshing out

Terraria is a wonderful little game from Re-Logic who's core
gameplay resembles Minecraft in many ways. It contains exploration,
combat, mining and building with blocks, but the main seperator from
Minecraft is the fact that Terraria is a two-dimensional game where
Minecraft makes use of 3D. Having played a lot of Minecraft, I just
couldn't get into Terraria; it seemed like a watered down 2D version of a
game I already liked. I didn't even open Terraria again for a few
months, until my brother was playing it one day and I logged on to play
with him.

Well, it turns out I was only half right and I
actually rather like the game. Terraria seems to focus more on killing
various bosses, exploring the map and moving NPCs into your shelter
area, where Minecraft seems focused more on building crazy contraptions.
One thing I didn't like about Minecraft was the fact that there was
really only one boss creature, and Terraria has multiple bosses that can
be summoned to kill over and over again.

In Minecraft the
exploration and fighting is pretty much pointless after you beat the
only boss, and all that's left is to build. Terraria kind of has the
opposite problem, in that you can keep summoning bosses and working on
getting the rare materials for the best gear in the game -- but once you
have it, there's really not much left to do. You can't build crazy
machines and contraptions to anywhere near the same degree you can in
Minecraft, so your left playing player-vs-player games online or
starting a new world and playing over again. Even then, you carry all of
your equipment and everything in your inventory with you to new worlds
so unless you drop it all in a chest beforehand there's really not much
point to that either.

Still, it's a fun game while it lasts.
You have multiple tiers of weapons, helmets, armors, leg pieces and
scores of various accessories that you can find or forge at a handful of
different crafting stations. Materials as basic as wood, stone and
copper to collect as well as rare ones such as diamonds or adamantite.
Fusing various pieces of equipment together to form new ones, building
housing areas for NPCs to move into so you can buy various goods from
them. NPCs move in after certain criteria are met, for example if you
rescue them from the dungeon, discovered a certain item or have a
certain boss defeated.

You can manufacture various picks,
drills, saws and hammers to gather resources from around the world. In
the process you can explore different areas of the map from forests and
deserts to oceans and jungles. Build your little blocks up into the sky
and you can come upon floating islands, or dig through them into the
bowels of the earth to come upon a hellish area filled with lava. The
whole world is presented in a 2D side-view, similar to Mario but with
smaller blocks (your character is 2 blocks wide and 3 blocks tall, for
example).

The graphics themselves aren't anything special, but
that's the art direction of the game. They would have looked great on
the NES, and having grown up in that era they have a certain nostalgic
value that I like. Equipping different weapons and armor at least
changes your character sprite, which I always like because it gives you a
visual representation of your accomplishments when you get new
equipment. There are a good number of different enemies and they're
fairly distinct. You've got slow moving zombies, jumping slimes, flying
eyeballs and tunneling worms. Enemies that shoot magical spells or
projectiles at you, and even rare enemies that are unique and drop
cosmetic items to change your appearance (you have an equipment slot for
each piece of armor, as well as a social slot just for looks).

The background music is pretty good and there's a bit of variety to it,
having somewhere around a dozen different tracks that play in different
situations. The first sound you hear will be a happy and playful tune
in the starting forest area during the day time. There's a serene track
that plays during the night, some slow dark music that plays in the
dungeon, as well as some other some faster more aggressive tunes that
play during boss battles. System requirements include Windows
7/Vista/XP, a 1.6 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, 200 MB of hard drive
space, a 128 MB video card that supports shader model 1.1 and DirectX
9.0c or greater.

Much of the fun I get from Terraria is from
playing with friends, and this can be done over the internet or over the
LAN. You can load up a character and play it in single-player and
multi-player games complete with all of its equipment, as well as any
items inside a Safe or Piggy Bank in the game-world (these two items act
like a shared-stash between worlds and can only be accessed by the
character who placed them). You can start a multi-player game of
Terraria from within the game client itself, or you can download a small
server application from the website and leave it running. I wish there
were a Linux server application so that I could leave it running on my
dedicated server so it would be online 24/7, but since the server
application is Windows only I only use it to play over the LAN.

Terraria is a pretty fun game, though it does get a little boring after
you've forged the best weapons and armor and there's little left to do.
At that point, you can enable PvP and fight with your friends online or
just repeat the same content over and over again. Personally I would
just set the game aside for a while and then restart a whole new game
from scratch in the future. You could arguably wait for an update from
Re-Logic and then restart the game, but the developer stated in February
that he's no longer going to be updating the game (though the Steam
page still said "Free Content Updates", which is more than a little
misleading since it's been about 4 months.

You can easily
switch between a melee character, a ranged character or a magic user
with a simple swap of armor and accessories. This means there's
relatively little replay value in experimenting with the different ways
you can play your character. There are no stat points or skill trees
either, so all of your customization comes from the armor and
accessories you equip. This is nice because it allows you to play your
character however you feel like without a complete restart, however the
replay value suffers because of it. The PvP does help, but there's only
so many times you can kill your friends (or die to them) before you get
bored. This would be a 5 star game if there were more building options
like Minecraft, or something (anything at all) to keep the game
interesting at the end.

I do recommend Terraria, and it's
worth of a 4 star rating. At $10 it's not that expensive, and you can
pick up a 4-pack on Steam for $30 if you have some friends you want to
play with. It's really fun until you've done everything, and then it's
still mildly fun for a while after that. Too bad there will be no
updates in the future to improve things further or add more content for
late in the game.